Doing Agile After Layoffs

Community

Agile

Topics

Agile in the Enterprise,

Change

Part of a development team has been laid off, the team is down to four developers with a part time Scrum Master and no dedicated Product Owner. Is Scrum still applicable? What options are there? How does one adapt?

•  By Mark Levison on Jan 07
•   Discuss

Article: Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters

Community

Agile

Topics

Collaboration,

Methodologies,

Agile Techniques

In this article, Mark Levison addresses the difficulties encountered by developers willing to adopt TDD, the reasons why many start using TDD but give up after a short period of time, and what could be done to help developers make TDD a habit.

•  By Abel Avram on Jan 07
•   2 comments

Requester Pays: A New Amazon Business Model

Community

Architecture

Topics

Business

Amazon has introduced a new business model for its S3 web services called Requester Pays. Businesses using S3 can mark up data buckets so their transfer will be paid by data requesters instead of being paid by their owners as it is now. Used in conjunction with DevPay, the new model opens new business opportunities for companies willing to share their data with others.

•  By Abel Avram on Jan 07
•   Discuss

Web Beans (JSR-299): Q&A with Specification Lead Gavin King

Community

Java

Topics

Web Frameworks,

JCP Standards

An ambitious and key part of Java EE 6, the Web Beans specification spans JSF/EJB integration, context management, dependency injection and AOP. The specification is currently in public review and the review period has been extended into 2009. An Alpha build is also available. InfoQ talks to Gavin King to find out more about the state of play of the specification and progress to date.

•  By Charles Humble on Jan 07
•   Discuss

Data Integration Software XAware 5.2 Supports Data-First Design and Data Services Design Wizard

Community

Java,

SOA

Topics

SOA Platforms

The latest version of XAware, an open source data integration software, offers data-first design feature. XAware development team recently announced the general availability of XAware 5.2 version.

•  By Srini Penchikala on Jan 06
•   Discuss

Erlang Bindings for Windows Azure

Community

.NET

Topics

Cloud Computing

One of the advantages of a REST architecture is that is makes it much easier to implement cross-language bindings. To wit, Sriram Krishnan has created a set of Azure bindings for the concurrent programming language, Erlang.

•  By Jonathan Allen on Jan 06
•   1 comment

New Patches for 1.8.x Fix Memory Leaks And Improve Performance

Community

Ruby

Topics

Runtimes,

Performance & Scalability,

Ruby on Rails

A few patches by Brent Roman promise to fix a long standing issue of memory leaks, particularly for continuations, for Ruby 1.8.x. They also happen to improve performance.

•  By Werner Schuster on Jan 06
•   Discuss

Difference Between Internal and External Release

Community

Agile

Topics

Agile in the Enterprise

Traditionally, software release is considered to be a handshake between engineering and business where a release made by engineering is passed on to the external world by business. In an interesting article, Israel Gat suggested the reason to split the software release into 'internal' and 'external' release, for the benefit of both engineering and business.

•  By Vikas Hazrati on Jan 06
•   8 comments

Code2Plan, a Free Visual Studio Agile Project Management Add-in

Community

.NET,

Agile

Topics

Artifacts & Tools,

Agile Techniques

Jesse Johnston and Denis Morozov created code2plan, an Agile software project management tool, as a beta Visual Studio add-in and released it for free. The tool also runs as a stand-alone application that can be used to track projects, iterations, user stories, features, tests, defects and builds.

•  By Abel Avram on Jan 06
•   2 comments

Ramnivas Laddad on Making AOP Choices With AspectJ and Spring AOP

Community

Architecture

Topics

AOP

Spring AOP/AspectJ combination offers many choices, whether they are AOP system, syntax or weaving related options, and a clear understanding of all those choices is important to apply them pragmatically when using Aspects in enterprise applications. Ramnivas Laddad said just one kind of AOP won't fit all applications and choosing the right combination will help developers be successful with AOP.

•  By Srini Penchikala on Jan 05
•   2 comments

JRuby: The Pain of Bringing an Off-Platform Dynamic Language to the JVM

Charles Nutter discusses bringing JRuby to the JVM, why Ruby is hard to implement, JIT compilation, precompilation, core Ruby implementation, Java library access, library challenges and future plans.

•  Jan 07, 2009,
•  

Performance Anti-Patterns in Database-Driven Applications

Alois Reitbauer specifies several architectural anti-patterns that one should stay away from and which can downgrade an application’s performance.

•  Jan 05, 2009,
•   19

Making TDD Stick: Problems and Solutions for Adopters

Teams in large organizations still struggle to adopt TDD. In this article Mark Levison shares problems he uncovered when he surveyed teams, and his own strategy to introduce TDD into an organization.

•  Jan 05, 2009,
•   2

Testing is Overrated

In this talk from RubyFringe, Luke Francl asks: is developer-driven testing really the best way to find software defects? Or is the emphasis on testing and test coverage barking up the wrong tree?

•  Jan 02, 2009,
•  

VM Optimizations for Language Designers

John Pampuch discusses the HotSpot compiler, the history of Java performance, HotSpot development philosophies and challenges, optimization, JVM library improvements, and tips for better performance.

•  Dec 31, 2008,
•  

Keith Braithwaite, an Agile Skeptic

In this interview, Keith Braithwaite, an Agile developer, consultant and trainer, says that we should show a good deal of skepticism towards today’s Agile practice.

•  Dec 30, 2008,
•   10

Workflow Orchestration Using Spring AOP and AspectJ

This article demonstrates how to build and orchestrate highly configurable and extensible yet light-weight embedded process flow using AOP techniques with Spring AOP and Aspect J.

•  Dec 29, 2008,
•   9

Embrace Uncertainty

Jeff Patton explains why one needs to embrace uncertainty in order to succeed with his/her Agile project and how to avoid some of the common mistakes leading to project failure.

•  Dec 27, 2008,
•   2